Writing as Gift and Responsibility
As I thought about what to write this week, I looked back at my list of ideas. There are definitely topics and ideas I will go back to, but what moved me most was an email I got from a dear long time friend who receives this newsletter.
“I often find myself writing down a statement from your work that touches me and helps me to make meaning.”
When I read this, I instantly burst into tears. Someone thought words that I wrote were worth writing down and helped them find meaning? I have words on post-its and scraps of paper, by writers I admire and people who inspire me, pinned to the wall that I face when I am writing. I know what it feels like to to read something and find myself in someone else’s words. It is a feeling of belonging, knowing that I am not alone in the world, that at least one other person had a similar thought, idea or feeling.
To be told that I had that kind of impact on someone else was mind blowing and humbling. My writing does matter and not just to me. I thought again of Robin Wall Kimmerer who said in her book Braiding Sweetgrass,1
“Language is our gift and our responsibility.”
Everyday, I am learning to believe that telling both personal stories and fictional stories (or a combination of the two) is how we can change the world around us for the better. To write the world we want to live in. Which brings to mind Audre Lorde and her essay titled “Poetry is Not a Luxury” (from Sister Outsider). I did not understood the importance and revolutionary nature of this essay until much later in my life.
“This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are - until the poem - nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt. p.36”
I am committed to writing the world I want to live in. To use my gift and honor my responsibility.
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